Mapleton Public Schools operates with the belief that you must create a culture where students are trusted and empowered. In their recent projects on Skyview Campus and York International, The Neenan Company was tasked with the creation of spaces for smaller specialty schools — one, Clayton Partnership School, is designed for K-8 learning; Academy High [...]
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Posts Tagged ‘classroom design’
Big Ideas for Small Schools
It would be hard to argue that small schools and specialized education are a bad thing. The small school movement holds that smaller institutions lead to greater attention to students, increased choice on the part of students and parents, and ultimately greater academic success. So across the country, schools are being carved into more tailored [...]
Learning to Sit in Rows?
As cultural preparation for the workplace has changed through the years, and as our understandings of the relationship between child psychology and learning methods have deepened, education has also traveled through different design phases. Today, many types of learning are recognized and accounted for, but the stereotype of school as a place for lecture-based indoctrination [...]
Schools 2050: Accelerating the Connection Between Green Building and Green Learning
As design and knowledge merge in the classroom, a sustainable, more ecologically balanced future comes closer. Students and teachers are vital to solving the big environmental problems and the tools for doing so are both architectural and educational. A building with fresh air, natural light, interactive spaces, and comfortable temperatures is not only healthy but [...]
Designing Learning Spaces for the Future
“It’s education that is meant to take us into this future we cannot grasp…No one has a clue what the world will look like in 5 years yet we’re supposed to be educating kids for it.” Sir Ken Robinson. In his book, Education Nation: Six Leading Edges of Innovation in our Schools, Milton Chen urges [...]
A School for Everyone
Meeker, CO is a small town with limited facilities. It has one elementary school, one junior high and one high school. Recently, however, its 71-year-old elementary school, home to over 50% of the communitys student population was showing some signs of disrepair. It was time for a change. But how to fund a new school [...]
The Brave New Classroom
The Brave New Classroom (reviewed kb and neenan) According to Roger Schank of the Institute for the Learning Sciences, “we should spend 1/3 of our day at the computer, 1/3 talking with others and 1/3 making something.” We tend to think of education as bound within the four walls of the traditional classroom; defined by [...]
Collaboration, Coordination and Cooperation: What do they mean really?
One of the goals at The Neenan Company is to bring effective collaboration, coordination and cooperation to the building process. But what do the 3Csreallymeanfor and with Neenan? Central to understanding the3 Csis not simply what they mean, but what they look like in practice. We could provide some simple definitions and move on, since [...]
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